EDSP 224 Meeting Instructional Needs of All Students

From the syllabus:

Course Description

Special Education and General Education teachers must be prepared to design and implement research-based instruction to support student achievement in inclusive settings. This course will explore research-based practices to foster inclusion of children with disabilities in general education classrooms. The course has a primary focus on students with moderate to severe disabilities, however practices explored will address the learning needs of a wide range of students.

(Professor J. Stratton, Spring 2020)

Sometimes the best way to understand the roles within a team is to try each role yourself. In this way, we can better understand and learn what each team member brings to the table and what we can do to better support them in return. This course provided the opportunity to learn more about my colleagues in special education. In addition, it allowed me to gain a better understanding of strategies and tools that should be employed to help the curriculum become accessible to our students with disabilities. However, the largest lesson I learned from this course was that our students with disabilities deserve to be in the general education classroom as much as possible. I learned that segregation based on ability is not acceptable and should not be used as a justification for removing students from the classroom. All students can learn from one another and should.

Before taking this class, I thought of Special Education as a separate department. So separate had my experiences been in the schools in which I had worked, that I often referred and heard others refer to special education students as “your kids” instead of “our kids”. While a seemingly innocuous change of pronoun, this is a big shift as I realized I have been doing our students a disservice by separating them from the classroom and classifying them as “other”. Through the IEP writing project as part of this course, I found that there is a tremendous amount of consideration that needs to be given to each child’s strengths and should be reflected in the IEP. Additionally, writing the SMART goals for a case study student was challenging in that they had to be realistic but also ambitious. Having the opportunity to delve deeply into the process of drafting an IEP highlighted the importance (and challenge) of taking the time for each element to best serve the student, including their own thoughts and goals as much as possible. This course also highlighted the need for appropriate assistive technology use. We learned a tremendous amount about effective technology tools to accommodate our learners with disabilities. Additionally, it became clear that by not using certain tools for our learners (i.e. voice to text software or audiobooks) we prevent access to an equitable education for these learners.

In the past when reading over IEPs for our students, I would often focus on the services section to determine how much “pull out” time my students with disabilities would be receiving. The interesting thing about the services section is that it provides the opportunity to consider other alternatives for the location of services. I had never before considered a co-teaching model for special education. However, after reading research done by prominent educators in the field such as Scruggs & Mastropieri (2017) I quickly realized that this is not only greatly beneficial for the student with the disability but enhances the overall quality of instruction for all of our learners. Looking at myself as a content level specialist or Subject Matter Expert and welcoming in a learning specialist such as a special educator can create a wonderful team of teachers who know the material and know how to teach it in the most effective manner for the particular students of any given year. Additionally, special education teachers often have historical relationships with the students on their caseload and are able to offer deeper insight into what works well for the student.

As a result of this course, I began to think about co-teaching as an extremely viable structure for my literacy classes. I continued to read about the success of this model and even chose to create a proposal to implement it in a subsequent class. While it was not accepted (due to scheduling challenges) for this year, I believe it started a conversation about the pull out structure we currently have. Questioning our systems that include pull out services exclusively for literacy special education and intervention is difficult to do as an outsider, new to the district. However, with the information gleaned from this course and resources introduced, I believe I was able to start some conversations within my building.

Scruggs, T. E., & Mastropieri, M. A. (2017). Making Inclusion Work With Co-Teaching.

TEACHING Exceptional Children, 49(4), 284–293. doi: 10.1177/0040059916685065

Handout co-created with my group demonstrating our understanding of inclusive classrooms

Throughout this course we studied what makes for an excellent IEP, maintaining high but attainable SMART goals for students based on their particular learning profile. Standout items included making sure students' strengths were listed comprehensively on the IEP, services should match and be aligned with the goals written, and significant and incremental progress should be expected and recorded. Additionally, all academic supports should be provided to the student to include assistive technology using the SETT framework.

Below is my attempt at writing a comprehensive and ambitious IEP for a fictitious case-study student, Paul.